My feet. My feet are 42 years old and I will have them with me, I hope, until the day I die. I spent the first 40 years of my life completely ignoring my feet and what they do. Mostly, I have lived my life in my mind. I am a lawyer. And working in law means working with ideas of justice, and fairness, and trying to achieve a right result. In my work I hear all about people’s problems with their fellow humans and then I try to use my mind to solve them. I love my work, but often the conflicts and the disputes between people are very silly – mostly about money, or power, or ego, or just plain gossip and ill will.
Quite differently from all of that, when I went for a long walk in Spain eventually I felt as though I was rooted to the earth with my feet, step after step.
In Spain they say this: paso por paso – step after step.
In Zimbabwe they say this: famba shavanaka - walk well.
My father says this: put one foot in front of the other, until you walk off the cliff.
I realized on the Camino that solitude is important to cultivate, important to take and protect for oneself. Without solitude life becomes sticky - sticky with life, sticky with people, sticky with the world and its wants. As I walked in Spain, my daily life was physically tactile. I left my mind and started to feel my way through grief. I began to feel the power of my own body, and the vibration of my own spine. And I started to think about the energy and the sound that lives deep within each human. And about music, and whales, and physics, and math.
I know for a fact that human beings have a sound deep within because I heard it in my brother's arm. When my brother was receiving dialysis, one of his arteries was brought to the surface of his skin and connected with a smaller vein to form a fistula. The sound and the vibration that ran through his fistula was as strong as the ocean. The truth is that the song and the force of my brother's beating heart could be heard at the surface of his skin. His very life had a sound.
For most of us, that sound is deep within and more or less silent while we go about the business of living.
In Zimbabwe, I became friends with a woman named Mirriam and spent a lot of time rubbing her foot. She had lost her left leg and foot to a crocodile, and lost her baby to the river at the same time.
Mirriam told me the story in English, and she mixed up the “I” and the “You”. So the story became this:
“You holding onto tree”
“Crocodile eating you leg”
“You take baby off you back”
“You put baby on ground”
“You baby fall into water”
“You … Kushinga….”
“You holding onto tree”She said: "My baby died." I said: "I had a baby die too." She said: "My brother is dead." I said: "My brother is dead too." She said: "My mother is dead." I said: "My mother is dead too."
We understood each other, Mirriam and I.
One day when Mirriam's dressing was changed on the stump of her left leg and she cried for her mother: "Amai! Amai!" I had to give her my arm to bite because there was nothing else I could do.
Kushinga is a Shona word that has no direct translation in English. It was explained to me as a particular form of courage; an active courage; courage in action.
I like to think that the sound in my brother's fistula, that sound in all humans that remains hidden most of the time, is something akin to kushinga. A quality of sound, a quality of life, that can sometimes become a verb.
